What is the idea/theme behind your tessellation? Throughout the process of creating my tessellation, we had many different ideas of patterns that we wanted to use. We noticed it was fall, and we are both looking forward to winter. We decided because we love winter, to make our project snow based. I ended up coming up with the idea of the snowman. I decided to add the child creating the snowman because it added another challenge that took our thinking one step farther. We decided to color each snowman the same color to keep it visually pleasing. The shape of the snowman worked perfect!

What polygon(s) did you start with and how did you alter it (what transformations did you use)? When we started this project, we started with a simple design. When we started to tessellate our simple design we started to realize the shape didn't fit into each other to create a accurate tessellation. We moved to a snowman. The snowman took three circles and the outline of a boy. We started with an original square, and we cut out our shape from the bottom. We pasted the cut out shape to the top. We than cut out the same shape from the left hand side, and attached that to the solid right side. We used translations to tesselate the shape onto the paper, and translated it through out the whole process.

What transformations describe how your pre-image tile moved to create your two image tiles (math overlay)? The transformations that described how my pre-image tile moved to create my two image tile was my transformations of my cut out shape to the adjacent side of my square. All four sides of my square were 90 degrees, and my shape was transformed onto all sides creating my final shape I was going to tesselate. When we added our shape onto each side it reflected the previous tessellation witch made our shape fit together. We didn't need to rotate our shape to tesselate it. Are tessellations math or art? I think tessellations are math. Tessellations have to be very structured and perfected for them to work. Tessellating takes skill and preciseness. There are many math techniques used in doing these pieces like shape and pattern. I think it's important to realize that art is free and un structured. Art is based on creativity. I can see how people think of a tessellation as art because it may include color and shape, but to have a art piece is to have no right or wrong way of approaching it. According to the google definition, art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. This helps portray my reasoning for why tessellations are math. In the tessellations we were not fully able to use imagination and creativeness. We still had the structure and a wrong way to approach the piece.